My Backwoods Canopus has been around for many years and I still haven't finished that either. I've got it to the stage where the chassis is complete and running - although I have to admit it's not very smooth - and the body is complete and just about painted.
Canopus in her present state
The whole thing is designed to dismantle quite nicely into the three major assemblies of cab/footplate, boiler/tank and chassis. I went one step further and attached the tank to the boiler with a 12BA screw to allow it to be removed for painting. This is great until any strain is put on the screw - in my case it to was due to a child-related incident...
The problem is that tapping into whitemetal isn't a great idea, as it works well initially but wears quickly if you take the screw in and out a lot of it or if the hole was a bit too big when you initially drilled it - in the latter case there's not much thread on the whitemetal to start with and it quickly wears away. In my case, a shock to the thread managed to strip it completely.
Canopus boiler and saddle tank
In the photos you can see that I've added little tapped 12BA brass inserts to the two tapped holes, one in the end of boiler weight where it's attached to the cab, and and one in the bottom of the tank. These are glues into tight-fitting holes with cyanoacrylate ("Dr Mike's", in this case). These are turned up from scrap brass and tapped 12BA, but you can do it easily enough without the aid of a lathe by using a 12BA nut or a length of brass tube tapped 12BA. The tricky bit is not getting the glue into the threads, but you can avoid this by lightly oiling a screw and running it into the thread, then cleaning off any oil on the outside before glueing it.
Cruel front-end enlargement
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